Statement on Student Protests

Tens of thousands protested recently in Delhi, which spread to other places to demand the Education Minister's resignation over repeated leaks of NEET exam papers. We understand and agree with the grievance behind the demand. We stand with the students and unemployed youth baton-charged and tear-gassed by police in New Delhi and other parts of India. We note that the Education Minister has now resigned but not before students have been lathi-charged, innocent volunteers vilified, and the force of state surveillance unleashed, especially on Muslim protestors and helpers of the movement. These acts are illegal and should have consequences for those who gave orders and executed the violence. Beyond this, we stand in solidarity with the youth and many others organising across India against exploitation, fascism, and displacement. The state violence we have witnessed is an extension of the daily escalating violence of the Indian state against the oppressed and exploited.

When the Chief Justice of India described jobless youth and activists as cockroaches and parasites, he was describing how a class in power perceives the youth of the country. The resulting movement reclaimed this label to empower the protests we are witnessing.

We say that these incidents are a direct result of capitalism shaping education policy across successive governments, with this process accelerating under the current BJP-led coalition.

We call for the abolition of NEET rather than a protection (from corruption) of NEET, and we say this as friends of the current movement.

India loses more than one student to suicide every hour. The government’s own figures, NCRB’s Accidental Deaths and Suicides report for 2023, record 13,892 student suicides in a single year, the highest in a decade and up nearly 73% since 2014. The same report counts 14,234 suicides of unemployed people. The real numbers are likely much higher. Youth from disadvantaged backgrounds, following the path laid out by Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, see education as the way out of the precarious conditions of landlessness and caste oppression they find themselves in. 

Entrance to professional education such as medical programmes is based on exams like NEET, that test based on professional private coaching, not the year-long curriculum-based learning (itself increasingly modified to fit Hindutva agendas). Access to and success here is based on resources including parental income, generational wealth, access to expertise, etc. This is with the background of public universities being defunded while private degree factories whose fees are beyond reach for the majority multiply. Even if you somehow scrape through this broken system, you have an economy that produces ‘trained youth’ without jobs to place. The leaks and frauds that have long been an issue reflect the corruption that intentionally maintains inequality in educational opportunities. 

The despair driving young people to take extreme steps if they don't make it through has now rightly come out into the streets.

S. Anitha saw this injustice clearly nine years ago. A Dalit student from Ariyalur, she scored 1,176 out of 1,200 in her Tamil Nadu state boards, enough, under the old system, for medical college. Under NEET she could not compete, because as we said above, NEET does not test what schools teach, it tests what coaching centres sell. She fought the exam in the Supreme Court and lost, and she died by suicide that September, aged seventeen. Tamil Nadu has demanded NEET's abolition ever since, and we support this demand.

A leak is but one example of the injustice baked into Indian education. Even a perfectly functioning NEET would continue to exclude marginalised youth. Hence, we call for the abolition of NEET, restoration of state board admissions, and free, publicly funded education from school to university that lifts people rather than ranking them. We believe in free education for all. It is also clear that simply more seats are needed, especially in medical courses, which NEET is for, when one looks at the doctor-patient ratio in India and the crisis in healthcare, whose burden falls disproportionately on the informal female workforce, ASHA workers.

Other Youth Issues to Pay Attention To

While these protests around NEET have received global attention, partly due to being among Delhi's largest protests after the farmer's strike and the CAA-NRC protests, there are many other challenges facing India's youth and several other struggles in India that the youth are leading or participating in. 

We would like to highlight the threat of demolition faced by Mohammad Ali Jauhar University as part of the Hindutva Bulldozer Raj’s targeting of Muslim communities. Students are conducting a sit-in protest to defend the existence of their university. This reflects the wider systemic exclusion of Indian Muslims (particularly those from oppressed caste backgrounds) from higher education, and the relative lack of education access in Uttar Pradesh. 

Meanwhile, in Punjab University, 20 socialist students were beaten and detained by the police the same day as the first day of the Delhi protests, while protesting against a seminar backed by the fascist RSS. These students were denouncing the RSS-BJP’s divisive fascist politics, its anti-Muslim violence, and its deeply patriarchal beliefs. This is after the recent Punjab University Bachao Morcha which successfully defended campus democracy and reinvigorated organised student politics. As a diaspora, we must support antifascist efforts in India and we stand in solidarity with India’s youth and student movements against fascism’s attacks on oppressed minorities.

We also view education and labour as two sides of the same coin. The young people of the country are not only failed as students. They are also failed as workers.

The youth facing barriers to education face further oppression when they enter the workforce through dilution of their rights, like the recent changes to the labour codes under the guise of ease of business.

This April, Noida saw largely young and educated workers launching a strike for a wage rise matching Haryana's. Over three hundred were arrested. Organisers, including labour activists, artists, and journalists, are still being detained under the National Security Act. Preventive detention has been deployed against the wage demand with credible allegations of custodial torture. The evidence that the UP Police has offered in their chargesheets includes absurd allegations, such as claiming that a children's library inauguration was a planning meeting, and accusing a man of “Marxist ideology”. 

We also are aware that some students are not even allowed to protest and face severe further consequences when they do like Rohit Vemula. It was largely students at Jamia and AMU who were among the first against the Citizenship Amendment Act along with Ambedkarite groups, and it was Muslim women at Shaheen Bagh who held the line longest. They paid for it with a police raid on the Jamia library, a pogrom in North East Delhi, and then with the conspiracy case. Sharjeel Imam, a PhD scholar at JNU, and Umar Khalid, a former JNU research scholar, have now been in jail for six years under the UAPA in the Delhi riots conspiracy case, alongside Khalid Saifi, Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, and others. No trial has begun. Bail has been denied, deferred, and dodged through more hearings than anyone can count, while men filmed leading mobs walk free, with some entering legislatures. 

Kashmiri students carry a heightened version of this weight everywhere they go. They have been beaten in hostels and marketplaces after cricket matches, charged with sedition and under the UAPA for WhatsApp statuses and tweets, thrown out of colleges for celebrating the wrong team, and detained back home under the Public Safety Act. For a Kashmiri student, attending a protest anywhere in India is a risk calculation most of their classmates never have to make.

In Bastar, Moolvasi Bachao Manch (MBM), built by Adivasi youth, largely students, was declared unlawful. These youths were the children of families displaced by the state-backed violence of Salwa Judum. MBM organised peacefully to oppose paramilitary camps built without their constitutional right of gram sabha consent, and to demand accountability for killings like those at Silger. It organised protests at more than thirty sites. In October 2024, the Chhattisgarh government banned it under the Special Public Security Act, a law under which the government need only be "of opinion" that an organisation is unlawful. No unlawful act is required. Its young leaders have been picked off one by one: Raghu Midiyami arrested by the NIA; Suneeta Pottam and Surju Tekam jailed on charges their lawyers describe as fabricated. A hundred lawyers have called the ban an attempt to dissuade an entire generation of young Adivasis from exercising their constitutional rights. The High Court declined even to hear the challenge, on the ground that an unregistered village youth organisation has no standing to complain about being banned.

When the clean air protests were the topical issue in Delhi not too long ago — some students tried to link the issue of air pollution in Delhi to ongoing Adivasi struggles against mining and militarisation. These students have gone on to face severe repression and violence for doing so. Now this repression has quickly widened even to those rallying around a narrower demand. We believe that their example leads to an important truth: if students in Indian cities connect their struggles to those of the Adivasis, peasants, workers, and oppressed minorities, then they would have real power. The system quakes at just the idea of this.

We demand:

1. The abolition of NEET and the restoration of state board–based admissions; 

2. Free, publicly funded education from school through university, with hostels, scholarships and mother-tongue provision that make education genuinely accessible for Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, and rural students.

3. Independent, adequately funded mental health support in every campus and coaching centre, and implementation of justice measures against casteism, homophobia and transphobia in higher education institutions.

4. The release of all those held under the NSA over the Noida strike and Lucknow conspiracy, withdrawal of the FIRs, and an independent inquiry into the torture allegations.

5. Release of Raghu Midiyami, Suneeta Pottam, Surju Tekam and all those arrested for association with it, and the repeal of the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act.

6. An end to the surveillance of students who participated in these protests and recognition of the right of students and young workers to organise without criminal reprisal.

7. Release of students, journalists and scholars from jail who have been illegally imprisoned for speaking truth to power  

What you can do

1.  Raise our model motion in your union branch, student union and local Party branch. 

2. Write to your MP about the NSA detentions in Noida, Lucknow conspiracy case and the ban on the Moolvasi Bachao Manch.

3.  Ask your union's international department to work with us in solidarity with their Indian counterparts. 

4. Join the various local demonstrations called by diaspora groups in your area.